Faculty & School Content Build and Migration

Owned by Jane Young (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Apr 14, 2016
2 min read

The basics

Timing: 4 months - July-Nov (but ideally work can be done in three months

Includes: 34 sites, 33 on separate standard Faculty and School templates & 1 on a unique Squiz template (NZ School of Music). The existing sites are made up of 5300 pages not included staff pages or recruitment content.

Work includes:

  • Design of new mobile responsive templates with modular design patterns publishers can choose from.
  • New homepages
  • Updated Events and News functionality that better integrates with homesite 
  • Migration of existing content. 

Proposed Structure: These templates will give each Faculty and School their own area, with their own homepage, but in the backend they won't technically be their own 'sites' so they are less time consuming to continuously improve.

We would like to move the existing content into new templates because:

  • we want all of the Faculties and Schools to get the benefits of the new templates as soon as possible
  • we may not have time to rework all of the content so this will allow us to prioritise content by where we can have the greatest impact.
  • we don't want to just apply a new design to the current templates as:
    • the way they are structured makes it time-consuming to continuously improve them.
    • they are quite old now and we would build them differently

Vision for migration

Scenario One: The ideal process

  1. New templates are built that encompass the different content patterns required. 
  2. Homepages are built freshly for all Faculties and Schools
  3. A technical solution moves the rest of the content to the new sites with the same structure. This process causes the minimum of disruption - it happens quickly and with minimal broken content.

Scenario Two: Incremental Migration

  1. New design is created and applied to existing templates so they have the look of the responsive template even if the content hasn't been optimised.
  2. Homepages are built freshly in new templates for all Faculties and Schools
  3. Existing pages are then moved over to new template incrementally, hopefully still with a technical solution but the awareness there may be more broken or tricky content. 

Scenario Three: Manual Migration

  1. New design is created and templates built.
  2. Homepages are built freshly in new templates for all Faculties and Schools
  3. Existing pages are then moved over manually